The expedition’s ascent into the Bitterroot Mountains on September 13, 1805 produced four overlapping journal entries that, read side by side, reveal how information traveled through the Corps of Discovery and how each journalist filtered the same day through his own preoccupations. The shared narrative spine is straightforward: Captain Lewis’s horse strays overnight, the main party proceeds up a creek past a remarkable hot spring, the guide briefly loses the trail, hunters bring in a deer, and the party crosses a dividing ridge to camp on west-flowing waters. Yet what each man chooses to emphasize — and what each omits — exposes the layered character of the expedition’s documentary record.
The Hot Springs: Four Ways of Seeing
The thermal springs along the creek dominate three of the four entries, and the close textual parallels between Whitehouse and Ordway are unmistakable. Ordway records that the spring “run from a ledge of rocks and nearly boiled and issued out in several places,” noting that Indigenous people had built “a little dam… for a bathing place.” Whitehouse echoes the same observations almost beat for beat:
passed a warm Spring, which nearly boiled where it Issued out of the rocks a Short distance below the natives has dammed it up to bathe themselves in, and the water in that place is considerable above blood heat.
Whitehouse, however, expands where Ordway compresses. He describes a sulphurous taste, the clarity of the water, and ventures a comparative judgment that the springs are “as good to bathe in &c. as any other ever yet found in the United States” — a touristic register absent from Ordway’s terser account. The pattern suggests Whitehouse working from Ordway’s notes (or a shared source) and elaborating with his own sensory impressions.
Clark, by contrast, approaches the springs as a natural philosopher conducting an experiment. Where the sergeants describe, Clark tests:
I tasted this water and found it hot & not bad tasted… I put my finger in the water, at first could not bare it in a Second
Clark also notes the geological context — the “hard Corse Grit” rocks of “great size” on the mountainside — and observes that game had worn roads to the springs, an ecological detail no other journalist records. His scientific register stands apart from the enlisted men’s more conventional travel-writing voice.
What Gass Saw — and What He Missed
Sergeant Gass’s entry is the day’s outlier. He omits the hot springs entirely, omits the lost horse, and omits the dividing ridge crossing. Instead, his entire entry is devoted to an encounter the other three journalists do not mention at all: the arrival of three Flathead Indians at camp with one of the hunters. Gass alone preserves the diplomatic intelligence:
They informed us that the rest of their band was over on the Columbia river, about 5 or 6 day’s journey distant, with pack-horses; that two of the Snake nation had stolen some of their horses, and that they were in pursuit of them.
This discrepancy is striking. Either Gass is recording an encounter the others suppressed, or his dating is slightly displaced from the events the others describe — a recurring difficulty with Gass’s published journal, which was edited by David McKeehan from Gass’s originals. The fact that Gass also reports “5 deer” killed where Clark, Ordway, and Whitehouse all record only one suggests Gass may be conflating events from adjacent days, or working from a different chronological framework.
The Guide’s Wrong Turn
A small but telling divergence concerns the moment the party loses the trail. Ordway notes only that “we had Some difficulty here in finding the direct trail, we went round a bad way.” Whitehouse offers a physical explanation: “we could not git along the Indian trail for the timber which had been blown down in a thicket of pine.” Clark, however, places responsibility squarely on the Shoshone guide:
my Guide took a wrong road and took us out of our rout 3 miles through intolerable rout
The captains’ frustration with Old Toby’s navigation, which would intensify over the coming weeks of the Lolo crossing, is already audible here. The enlisted men, lacking command responsibility, render the same incident as a logistical inconvenience rather than a judgment on the guide.
Read together, these four entries demonstrate the expedition’s documentary method at its most revealing: a shared core of observation, sergeants whose accounts cluster textually, a captain whose register tilts toward measurement and command, and — in Gass — a journal whose editorial history continues to puzzle the careful reader.
This analysis was prepared with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor.
